


give ourselves one more chance

by sinead



Category: Stargate Atlantis
Genre: 5 Things, Kissing, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-26
Updated: 2015-10-26
Packaged: 2018-04-28 08:19:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,026
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5085274
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sinead/pseuds/sinead
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Five times John hears the music.</p>
            </blockquote>





	give ourselves one more chance

 

[_who's next_](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SHhrZgojY1Q)  
  
When he gets to prep school, John is polite with the teachers, distant with other students, and thoroughly miserable.  He doesn't want to be home, exactly, but he doesn't want to be here, either.  His father's money has gotten him a single room, and he spends a lot of time in there with the door shut.  
  
He opens that door one Saturday, intending to take his work and go lie on the hill behind the auditorium, where he can watch the small private planes do take offs and landings at the nearby airport--there are instructors there who give lessons, and also, a lot of rich people in this neighborhood.  It's a thing he lets himself have and not talk about in his letters home.   I'm fine.  Classes are going well.  I may join the intramural golf team.  Once the door to his room is open, sound--music--that had been muffled roars in from the hall.  There is another door open, two down from his, the room of a kid who had just transferred in that week.  Ordinarily, John would glide by that open door without stopping, but something makes him look.    
  
The kid inside is slouched on the unmade bed.  His school jacket is slung across the desk, and his tie is loosened, his shirt half untucked.  His blond hair is a silky mess.  He looks half asleep, in spite of the volume coming from the giant boombox on the floor.  He looks up at John, and gives him a lazy, inviting smile, the kind of smile that John has never seen before and won't see again for some time after he leaves prep school.  John realizes that the boy is ridiculously good-looking, about the same time he realizes that he has taken a step towards the open door.  He feels young and awkward, strangled by his own clothes, his cowlicks precariously slicked down, his bag stuffed with text books and his calculator and binoculars for watching the planes.  He feels the weight of everything he's not.  "we won't get fooled again," screams the singer, and the boy beckons him inside.  John goes.  
  
  
  
[_johnny cash with his hot and blue guitar_](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-MGnIdwZl-8)  
  
John doesn't go to gay bars, especially not the kind of bars that have deejays and mirrors on the walls.  He can't dance, and he's trying to fly under the radar anyway, so the only bar he'll set foot in is the kind that could just as well be named Plausible Deniability.  They're usually fairly dark, and fairly quiet, shot-and-a-beer kind of places, with sports on the crappy tv behind the bar.  Sometimes there's a pool table; sometimes there's a jukebox.    
  
He's in one of these places, in the men's room stall, with his hand down the dusty jeans of a really hot guy.  Might be in the building trades--a carpenter, maybe.  They hadn't talked much.  The guy has good hands; one of them is sliding down under the waistband of John’s boxers, cupping his ass while the guy tilts his pelvis up, up, pressing his cock harder into John’s palm.  "Do y' like Cash?" the guy had said; this was a bar with a jukebox.  John had been leaning against it, trying to look casual, trying to hold his beer bottle like this was something he'd been doing for years.  For a surreal moment John had thought the guy was offering him money--John had been propositioned that way a couple of times, but not by really hot guys, not in bars like this--and then the guy leaned across him and fed a quarter into the slot.  The song started, and, oh.  Oh.  "Sure," he shrugged.  He knew he'd heard "Ring of Fire" someplace, on the radio, maybe, and thought it was kind of cheesy, but what the hell.    
  
Now his back was against the wall, and the music was vibrating through it, the guy's gasps weaving into the escalating march of the guitar's notes, winding John up like a top.   I lie awake at night to wait til you come in, and the voice is so sweetly rough, so piercing.  John comes, hard.  cry cry cry, sings Johnny Cash.  John never sees Dusty Jeans again, but he buys the Johnny Cash cd the next day.      
  
         
  
[_good vibrations_ ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Eab_beh07HU)  
  
He is stationed in California for a while, long enough to take some leave at the beach and shed the Air Force when he needs to.  He spends some weekends hanging out with a guy whose obsessions are punk, pot, surfing and trying new positions for mutual cocksucking.  His elaborate sound system is permanently set at a level he calls Really Fucking Loud.  They fuck to Dick Dale, and the Beach Boys.  They fuck to Surfer Rosa.  The music is like a wall John can lean against, it closes over his head like water and he drowns in the pleasure of it.  His weekend buddy doesn't exactly qualify as a love affair, but other than Nancy, it's the longest relationship he has, until Atlantis.  Until Rodney.  
  
  
  
_song without a name_  
  
John goes through the gate a hundred times and never realizes, until one day when Rodney dials up Atlantis from the deserted planet they have just finished scouting and John says, "Wait.  Stop," before anyone can go through.  "There's something wrong, didn't you hear that?"  
  
"Hear what?" says Rodney, looking alarmed and crouching.  "Oh my god, is someone shooting at us?  Never trust a deserted planet--"    
  
"I heard nothing," Teyla says.    
  
"Me neither," Ronon says.  
  
"No, no, the gate--there's something wrong with the gate," John says.  "The notes are off."  
  
After a lot of frustrating explanations, raised eyebrows (Teyla), and skeptical snorting (Rodney), John is finally able to convey that he hears different musical tones for each symbol when the gate is dialed, that he always hears musical tones when the gate is dialed, and no, his hearing is fine, thank you very much McKay.  Yes, he also hears the mechanical sounds, the tones are just an extra layer of sound on top of that.  Which he didn’t realize everyone else didn’t hear, too.  Which was _why_ he never mentioned—oh for fuck’s sakes, give it a rest, Rodney.    
  
"Won't hurt to take a look," says Ronon.  With some muttering, Rodney crawls under the DHD, where his muttering quickly turns to cursing and then to ominous silence.  He crawls out eventually, holding a strange device and looking queasy.    
  
"It's sabotage," he says, turning the thing over in his hands, "maybe something the original inhabitants left as a kind of ’screw you’ to the Wraith.  It looks like it purposely destabilizes the wormhole when you dial out, and who knows where you end up when you go through the gate.  Another galaxy, out into space, maybe it just scatters your atoms and then—”  He puffs a breath across his bunched fingertips, spreading them like he’s blowing seeds from a dandelion— _all gone_.   They have a horribly frozen moment of contemplation.  Then he looks up at John with wild eyes and says, without the slightest irony, "I could kiss you, Major, I really could."  He fumbles a bit with his diagnostic computer in the pregnant silence that follows, and adds, "or, well.  You know what I mean.  Yay, Ancestral gene."  
  
They dial out once Rodney has patched the DHD back together—“That’s in tune,” John says, “that sounds perfect”—and test the wormhole connection.  Chuck sounds a little bemused when John tells him to clear the area around the gate so that Ronon can lob a good-sized rock through it, but he complies, and then reports, "Your, um, rock has been scanned, and the molecular structure is intact."  There is a pause.  "And Biro says she wants Ronon for the softball team."  
  
Once they are safely back home, Rodney rushes off with the device, calling up Zelenka as he goes.  He flaps a hand back at them, but doesn’t look at John.  Teyla heads for the debrief with Elizabeth; Ronon hangs back for a moment and claps John on the shoulder.    
  
"Thanks, buddy," he says, with one of his rare grins, "I don't think I'm going to kiss you, though."  He strolls after Teyla.  John doesn't know what to do with any of this, he really, really doesn't.  
  
  
  
[_the people on the edge of the night_](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uMQb9LCNGxs)  
  
John is lying on his bed, staring up at the ceiling.  The room is very quiet.  In spite of that, he doesn’t jump when Rodney comes bursting through the door unannounced—it feels inevitable—but he does feel compelled to say, as he swings his legs over and sits up, “Knock, knock, Rodney.”  
  
Rodney doesn’t have a snappy comeback—instead, he hovers in the center of the room for a moment, and then gestures vaguely at the door, “Oh, well.  Yes.  Sorry.”    
  
John eyes him curiously.  “Something on your mind?  Sit down, you look like you’re waiting for a bus.”  
  
Rodney hesitates; the only place to sit is the bed, because John’s desk chair was commandeered for the conference room, since he never uses it anyway.  Rodney shuffles forward, and perches on the edge of the mattress next to John.  There is quite a lot on his mind, apparently.  The entire science section is in a tizzy—this is not Rodney’s word, but John interprets—over this previously unsuspected effect of the gene, and they all want to know if it applies to any other expedition members and other sorts of Ancient tech.  Simpson has set up a spreadsheet for doing testing.  Zelenka is hoping for practical applications—“diagnostic stuff, devices we haven’t been able to repair, that kind of thing.”    
  
“Oh, great,” John says.  “I’m going to be the piano tuner.”  But Rodney is unheeding, off again, talking about wave theory and quantum harmonics, and the implications for various projects, waving his hands and still not really looking at John.  Eventually he runs down and stops.  
  
“I’m a little jealous,” he finally says.  He’s trying for a light tone, and missing it ever so slightly.  “I want to hear the sounds myself.  It’s so corny, but—music of the spheres, whatever.  You know.”    
  
“Well,” John says, trying for his own brand of lightness, “it’s okay.  I give it a six.  Nice beat—“  
  
“—but can you dance to it?” Rodney finishes with a faint, pained smile.  Teasing Rodney is a reflex action by now, but this time, John sort of feels like a heel for joking.  
  
“I wish you could hear it, too,” he says, and jostles Rodney’s shoulder with his own.  Rodney turns and looks at him, then, his eyes very intense and blue.  
  
“I meant what I said,” he says.  “The other thing.”  John thinks,  kissing.  John thinks, is that what he means?  And then again, like a drawn-out sigh, oh, kissing.  He can’t imagine what his face is doing, but Rodney frowns and probably barely restrains himself from snapping his fingers.  “The kissing,” he clarifies.  “It’s just—occasionally it is borne in upon me that you are sort of extraordinary.”  
  
“Well,” John says hoarsely, “I may hear the tune, but you were the one who fixed the gate, Rodney.”  He sways a little, and Rodney sways with him, leaning in.  As their faces get close, John can see the sweep of Rodney’s eyelashes, the faint patch of stubble on his cheek.  With a hairsbreadth between them, they each tilt their heads to the perfect angle, and their lips touch, softly, softly.  John opens his mouth, feels the ghost of Rodney’s breath across his lips, Rodney’s strong hands reaching up to grip his arms.  They roll down onto the mattress.  The kissing gets hotter, sloppier, breathier.  John groans when Rodney tongues his ear; Rodney groans louder when he gropes at John’s fly.  John pulls at his shirt, getting his hands on Rodney’s skin, anchoring himself with his palms on Rodney’s back, Rodney’s weight pulled in to hold him down, set him free.  To keep the music going.  
  
"Hah," Rodney mutters, as he pulls up John's shirt to bite his chest.  "Piano tuner."  
  
"Shut up and kiss me some more, Rodney," John tells him.      
  
   
  
  
  
  
  
  
     
  
               
  
  


**Author's Note:**

> The version of "Under Pressure" that I linked in the story is not actually a capella, but it is the vocal track stripped out of the final mix. I thought the eerie quality suited this story. If you haven't heard the full version, though, you should [most definitely listen to it.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aUW_8cWG7YA) It was released in 1981, and is all about the big gay youthful experience that John, for better and for worse, did not get to have.


End file.
